Will The UK’s New Prime Minister Sink The UK’s Quantum Industry?

Everything the UK quantum industry has built since 2014 now depends on choices Andy Burnham makes in his first week in office. A single department houses the programmes, the money and the people that hold the UK quantum industry together. • Andy Burnham has asked officials to draw up plans to abolish DSIT, the department that anchors the UK quantum industry’s core support programmes. • The UK quantum industry rests on twelve years of stable policy, from the 2014 National Quantum Technologies Programme to the £2.5 billion National Quantum Strategy. • A rushed departmental merger, a Treasury raid on unspent commitments, or crude regional fragmentation could each set the UK quantum industry back. • Companies such as Riverlane, PsiQuantum and Oxford Ionics show both the strength and the fragility of Britain’s position. • Oxford Ionics, a British startup, has already been sold to America’s IonQ for $1.075 billion, the largest UK quantum exit to date. • Britain has been here before, selling Autonomy, the much maligned AI forerunner, to Hewlett-Packard for around $11 billion in 2011 and DeepMind to Google in 2014. • The fix is cheap, keep a cabinet-level owner for science, reaffirm the ProQure timetable, and leave the…